MacMost Now 566: iWeb Alternative: WordPress.com

Another alternative to iWeb and MobileMe hosting is WordPress.com. This free blogging service uses the WordPress software and allows you to set up blogs or a general Web site. You build and modify your site completely online.

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's look at WordPress.com. It's a free online service that allows you to create a website and it's a good alternative to iWeb and MobileMe hosting. Now let's distinguish between WordPress the software, and WordPress.com. WordPress is open source software that you can use to build websites, and you can install it on your own server or you can have a professional web host and have it installed there, or install it yourself. But WordPress.com is a service very similar to, say, Blogger that we talked about in the last episode, where you can create your own website without having to know all the details about servers and hosting. Now if this is your first time using WordPress.com you start off by giving a sample name for your blog, like that, and then it will populate a username based on that, and you can change either one of these. Then you need to go and check your email to verify your registration. So once you're in, you can go to your blog, go to the dashboard for it and you can begin to add posts and modify things in your blog. So for instance, let's go and add a new post here, and we give it a title and publish it. You have a lot of functionality over publishing your post, what you can put in them. You can edit them with lots of detail, you can add images and video to it. All sorts of different things. Now the location for your blog will be at that address that we specified in the beginning. So MacMostsample.wordpress.com. And you can see here the exact address for that first post. And this is what my site looks like. Now I'll get a toolbar here at the top since I'm logged in and I can change different things, like I can go in and edit posts, create new posts, and I can also add pages as well as posts for things, like about me pages and resumes and such. I can change a lot of the different settings. Now I can also go back to the dashboard and on the left here I can hit a lot of different things including appearance. So here is where I can really change different things, like themes for my blog and add menus to all sorts of different thing's, backgrounds. Make lots of different modifications. you can even set a domain for your blog so you don't have to use the WordPress.com domain, which is always a good idea because you can move to your own host or even leave the WordPress service completely and go to some other service. And if you've had your MobileMe web hosting set up for a domain you can actually switch it to here so that people visiting your site will suddenly come to your new site at WordPress.com but it will look like it's at the same domain. They won't notice the difference, except that your site might look a little bit different. Now if your website is not a blog, don't be put off by the fact that WordPress is a blogging platform. Most websites are in fact blogs, even if they are just a series of articles or they have a series of different pages. There's so many different ways you can customize a WordPress blog to not look like a blog at all, but just a website with a bunch of different information on it. And since this is free, I encourage you to go and play around with WordPress as well as Blogger, which I talked about last time, and some services which I'm going to talk about in the future to find out what the best replacements for MobileMe's web hosting is for you. So later this summer I also want to talk about using a professional web host, and you can use WordPress the software there to run your site. As a matter of fact, that's what MacMost is, it's a WordPress site. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

i use MobileMe/iWeb sites to sell fans (thru Paypal) access to my live concert recordings, streaming or as downloads thru iDisc password access. 40 minute songs are the norm. Any comparison of available music web sites like CDBaby’s HostBaby would be welcome!
danl

If you are using Paypal links to have people pay for things, then you can continue to use those same links with any new host you choose.

Bonnie Elsten

6/17/11 @ 10:59 pm

I travel to places where I do not always have internet access. iWeb allows me to write my blog, then publish it when I do have access. Blogger does not give me that freedom. Suggestions for a replacement for iWeb and MobileMe?

Well, you can always just write it on your local machine and then upload later. That’s what iWeb is doing, really, anyway.

Steve Maynard

8/31/11 @ 10:00 am

Hi Gary, Thanks for this video as well as the ones on Google Blog & Site as alternatives. You mention that MacMost is a WordPress site. If you were starting from scratch today — and know what you know — which would you use (WordPress or Google Blog)? Why? Thanks, Steve